Excluding Undocumented Immigrants From the Census Could Cost States Billions

In recent weeks, President Trump has indicated that he wants the US Census Bureau to start work on a “new” census that would explicitly exclude people living in the country without legal status, including those who are undocumented or living in the country without proper authorization. Changing who gets counted and excluding undocumented immigrants from the census has real consequences. The census determines how many seats each state gets in Congress and how many Electoral College votes they have in presidential elections. It also affects the distribution of billions of federal dollars for schools, roads, health care, and countless other vital programs.

The census is mandated by the US Constitution, which explicitly states that it should be conducted every 10 years and count “the whole number of persons in each State,” as per the 14th Amendment. For more than 150 years, the US Census Bureau has followed these instructions. Deviating from these guidelines now to exclude the roughly 11 million US residents without legal status would hurt communities nationwide, underscoring the harms of unprecedentedly excluding undocumented immigrants from the census.

How Census Data Are Used

The Census Bureau faces many challenges trying to count the roughly 340 million people living in the country. Natural disasters, declining survey response rates, language barriers, political pressures, budgetary uncertainty, and other issues all throw up obstacles to this massive undertaking.

Despite these challenges, the 2020 Census was remarkably accurate, cost $13.7 billion, and came in under budget. The bureau hired around 288,000 temporary employees to help collect the data, enough workers to show up in national jobs data. Planning for the 2030 census started in 2019, and the bureau worked halfway through 2022 to complete their analysis of the 2020 Census.

Once collected and analyzed, decennial census data are used to help government agencies, businesses, and community groups allocate resources and plan for the future in several ways. Omitting people without legal status from the census could have profound effects across the country because of the following uses.